Vic Gundotra is up welcoming everyone back. Asks if everyone’s happy with the Samsung tablets. Telling everyone the mystery blue vouchers will give everyone a 4G Verizon hotspot. I have a 4G phone, FYI — the bandwidth is amazing.

Welcoming Sundar Pichai senior VP of Chrome, who says “welcome to the Chrome keynote.” So no doubts about what this will be about. Update on Chrome, Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS.

Last year, said 70 million Chrome browser users. Now where at? Lots of numbers flashing. 160 million, to cheers in the crowd.

Last year, worked hard on getting out the Mac and stable Linux versions and working to six week schedule. Chart shows progress:

Now to talk about progress of HTML 5 in chrome. Ian Ellison-Taylor coming up. He’s wearing a Blue Sun T-shirt from Firefly / Serenity that I just bought last week, by the way. Cool.

Showing now speech in Chrome, with Clicker.com as an example. Now he’s about. Now he’s searching for “emma caulfield” by speaking into the app and getting matches that come up for Bandwagon. “I’m genuinely surprised it work” especially that he has a English/America accent.

Now he’s showing how he can speak into Google Translate, “welcome to san francisco” and have it translated and spoken in Chinese. Asks if anyone knows in the audience if it was right. Yes, come some cries.

Now talking about speeding up JavaScript, using CSS, Canvas 2D. OK, I’m sorry — these parts of the keynotes tend to get beyond me. So I’ll parrot anything interesting.

Now seeing that damn fishtank app running in Chrome, showing how it’s slower but with all the new awesome stuff, you can get like 1,000 fish flying along. A 10X improvement over where Chrome was, he says. “You didn’t have to do anything. Chrome just got faster.”

More fish, more demos. Now we’re looking at a CAD demo.

OK, enough speed, Vikas Gupta up to talk about in app payments. Showing Graphically Comics from the Chrome Web Store. Wanted to let people start reading first, then decide to make purchase later.

Now possible with API. “All it takes for you to implement this is a single line of code.” Aside from implementation, wanted to figure out how to do the pricing. A 5% flat fee, he says — easy to understand. The crowd breaks out in cheers.

Peter Vesterbacka now up from Angry Birds. Hasn’t been possible to bring Angry Birds to the web, but now it is, through Chrome. Seriously, aren’t we done with this freaking game?

But the crowd loves it. Built with WebGL, I gather also first time ever available on the web. They’re playing it on stage:

“Now we’ll make those flights more bearable,” he says, since the game also gets locally stored, so you can play the whole thing offline.

And the Chrome edition has little Chrome flowers and things throughout it. And special levels.

Sundar says it’s great that now we can have Angry Birds, which couldn’t have been on the web a year ago. Except it could have, right? I mean, you could have written an actual app for Windows or Mac etc. But you get his point — it’s in a browser.

Aaron Koblin now talking about 3 Dreams of Black with an interactive multimedia experience for the web. And now I have a sugar high from having digested all those buzz words in one sentence.

Now there’s music, a dream world, it’s like Baron Munchausen in Chrome. A buffalo is being transformed into a tarantula. 3.js library is being thanks for making a lot of this possible. I’m back to parroting now, sorry.

Here’s Sundar again, shifting us to Chrome OS. Chrome OS is nothing but the web (Jolie O’Dell by the way, now likely angry because it’s really Linux OS with Chrome on top. This is a pet peeve of hers, and I promised yesterday to get the word out).

Chromebook is announced, instant on, always connected, all day battery, access your stuff anywaere, gets better over time. That is, the name “Chromebook” seems out there for the first time — Steven Levy next to me remarks that it’s the first he’s heard them use this, and I think that’s right.

Kan Liu is now up to explain. Shows how in file manager, he can now select an image and view it. Now he selects a music file and it plays music (um, like Chrome’s spent time working to be able to do what “regular” computers already do?).

Now he’s playing a video clip. Amazing. You can watch video on a laptop. This is revolutionary. OK, it’ll be nice that Chromebooks have this type of feature, yep.

Now playing Google Music. Hulu and Netflix will also just work. Um, um, — I can use these things on regular computers already. This isn’t groundbreaking. But it does bring Chromebooks to being more attractive, if you want the configuration simplicity.

Now he’s pushing a photo to Picasa easily. Now he’s selecting a document that he wants to upload. Off to the cloud it goes. All built into the platform, and the APIs will work for anyone.

Box.net, for example, is building an upload app, too. Picks and sends to Box.net. “It’s just that simple,” he said. I guess I’m still underwhelmed, but I’m glad if there’s better support for local production and syncing to the cloud.

And now Sundar is back. “The cloud has more storage than any single computer,” he says, so really want to make it easy to store there and get to it anywhere.

Says worked hard to make some applications work offline, especially Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs offline. These will all be available in the summer.

Many games work offline, as do things like NYT and Huffington Post apps. Actually, I noticed earlier this week just how much is in the Chrome Web Store. Lots. And yet, I don’t even think to go there and get apps. Which says at least for me, Google’s got some habits to break.

Chromebooks now. First one is from Samsung. 12.1″ display, all day battery, wifi and 3G cell versions. “And it’s available in two colors” he says, to laughs.

Acer has one with a full size keyboard. Wifi and 3G verisons. $429 for Samsung wifi, $499 if 3G. Acer is $349 and up. Available June 15 through Amazon and Best Buy.

Also in UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Italy, as well as US.

Partnered with Citrix and VMware so many types of enterprise apps can work on Chromebooks. IHG has been piloting Chromebooks. Jason’s Deli also, put Chromebooks in a few stores, “seamlessly” able to deploy. City of Orlando has them in offices, firetrack, only feedback is that they want more powercords because they use them everywhere.

Businesses can get the same Chromebooks but there’s also a “Chromebox” that’s coming — couldn’t get a pic fast enough, but think Mac Mini.

Chromebooks for Business, software and hardware packaged together. Chromebooks, web console, support (while, Google back on hardware support). All for $28 per user.

Chromebooks for Education is $20 per month. All comes direct from Google on June 15. And google.com/chromebook has info.

Now funny video showing to explain the Chromebooks to consumers, didn’t catch if this is going on TV or what. Will try to update when I can confirm. Here’s the video:

And everyone at Google I/O will get a Chromebook, which is making the crowd, as you expect, go wild. And that’s the keynote done.